The present invention relates to monitoring one or several similarly constructed process control stations and including a redundancy station.
The publication 01/70/10 DE 659/10.80 Ca of applicant's assignee and called "Contronic P Digital-" page 39, left column, describes a monitoring system for altogether four similarly constructed process control stations under inclusion of an additional redundancy or standby station which in case of dropout of one of the process stations takes over its function. The redundancy station includes at least one central processing unit with associated operating memory. These particular components are quite similar to those in each of the four regularly operating process control stations. A system bus interconnects the station bus of the redundancy station with the station bus of the individual process station under utilization of a so-called redundancy coupler. Aside from the similarities already mentioned, the redundancy station includes the same configuration data as well as firmware components as the four associated process stations. However, details of this particular monitoring system are not derivable from the publication above.